Speculation abounds that the reason Google is devaluing so many worthwhile websites in its PageRank system has to do with sites (like mine) selling paid links. As mentioned earlier, before signing up with Text-Link-Ads, the company I sell static links through, I checked with Google to make sure it didn’t violate their TOS; they assured me that it did not. But this only means that I can use AdSense alongside the TLA system. It is not a guarantee that I would not be penalized for selling paid links.

Regardless of the intricacies of their terms of service, the fact remains that selling paid links runs counter to what Google tries to publicly stand for in terms of how it values information. Google wants to present the image that they give you the “most relevant” search results, period. They separated themselves in the information-services space from competing search engines in the late 1990’s on account of the fact that they would not allow companies to pay them for increased ranking in their search results.

Obviously I don’t work for Google, but I would speculate that their historical differences over the “paid link question” has to do with their origins and search competitors. If they don’t accept payment to increase search listings, perhaps their policy is that the sites they index should not either? (In other words, they want to control what you can and cannot say and link to…)

The question behind all this has to do with information valuation. What makes a particular bit of information more worthwhile or valuable than another bit? What makes people link to a website?

If information is “good” the Informational Free Market theory would suggest that it will “rise to the top” naturally. You will often hear this among SEO’s repeated like a mantra: write good content and people will visit it and link to it. This approach has panned out for me personally with my website. But it’s often hard to figure out what other people consider to be “good content.”

The notion that someone paying you to link to their website means that the link itself is therefore not as good somehow, or not “authentic” strikes me as rather questionable. For example: say a news story breaks out, and tons of bloggers link to it for free, quoting big chunks of it because they believe it to be valuable information. Classic understanding of how Google values pages would seem to suggest that the site on the receiving end of all those links and traffic would naturally rise to the top.

But what if it turns out that elements of the original news story were not just planted by another corporate or government source (which happens all the time), but that the information in it was actually paid to be included in the first place? Does that make the information contained therein not as valuable? Does it make people’s interest in it not as real or meaningful? What happens to the value of those hyperlinks to that content?

What about a new movie coming out or a new product? Media and other giant corporations get to sow their messages across vast audiences, and they do it in many cases by beating the bushes with people like me. (And then selling the results back to corporate clients as market research) Once in a while I get approached by public relations people hoping I will talk about their product. Some are smart about it and target it to my interests and audience. Others just blast it out en masse, hoping to see what sticks. But in no case have any of those companies offered me money to talk about their product or their movie.

And yet, as a website owner and professional online content producer, I find those kinds of marketing campaigns to be a lot less meaningful when compared with companies who are actively willing to pay me something like $50 a month for a link to their website to help out their traffic and ranking. In fact, I’ll link to websites that way whose content and message I have no interest in and in most cases literally no knowledge of what I am supporting. I do it all the time and I don’t care! But the point is that I am being compensated in a way which is immediately meaningful to me: financially.

So information which has been bought and sold directly and in an up-front manner is somehow less valuable than information which has been subtly influenced from behind the scenes through a chain of invisible corporations and sly marketers?

THAT’S JUST FUCKING STUPID.

And wrong. And if that’s the cornerstone of Google’s informational philosophy, then they will be replaced in short order by companies who can address the needs of all comers in today’s information marketplace, instead of a select few!